


Preserve and Persevere

by chicleeblair



Category: Newsflesh Series - Mira Grant, Slings & Arrows
Genre: Disability, Disney World, F/F, F/M, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Oxford, Post-Canon, Sibling Incest, Theater - Freeform, Yuletide 2019, a zombie story without graphic violence, but it’s barely anything compared to canon, cerebralspinal kellis-amberlee, ferry pass is not a town Ms. Grant, full of headcanons, i mean i warned for violence, i’ll tag that post yuletide, kind of a crossover with slings and arrows, the things i googled for this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicleeblair/pseuds/chicleeblair
Summary: Alisa Kwong barely escaped the Second Rising thanks to the Masons—both sets—but the trauma of that day follows her as she grows up to become a new kind of Newsie—one who refuses to believe that a world with zombies has to revolve around them all the time.Slings & Arrows characters show up about a third of the way in, and knowledge of that show is not necessary. Essentially, an actor becomes artistic director at the theater where he once suffered a mental break onstage. It is brilliant.
Relationships: Alisa Kwong/OFC, Ellen Fanshaw/Geoffrey Tennant, background Georgia Mason/Shaun Mason
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Preserve and Persevere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voleuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voleuse/gifts).



> This probably should have been a simple “the Rising happens at Disney! story.” 
> 
> it’s not. 
> 
> Basically, I thought of all the places/situations/themes I wanted to explore in a Post-KA world and squashed them into this.

“To all who come to this happy place, welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts which have created America.”

—Walter Elias Disney, on the opening of Disneyland July 17th, 1955.

“Get me the freak out of freaking Florida.”

Alisa Kwong

If there’s anyone who identifies with Disney’s dedication to putting a shiny veneer over the world, it’s my mother, Stacy Mason. But if that’s true, why did your family only go to Anaheim, like twice, you ask. Don’t pretend you didn’t watch every broadcast from my childhood. Everyone did. The details are a matter of public record, and what’s pertinent here is that Disney has not had an outbreak on one of its properties since the rope dropped post-Rising. Oh, there have been some near misses. Rumors, particularly when the suicide-via-gondola stories pop up. They used to say that no one was ever pronounced dead on Disney soil—Maybe those who show signs of amplification are escorted out of the gate by the guard administering their blood-test. Call it working the numbers. I call it good security. And that’s the thing: Disney’s security is good. Top notch. Good enough that families whose kids have never entered a school building take annual summer vacations—and if, as message board myth has it, they pump in low doses of anti-anxiety medication in with the popcorn scent; well. It keeps being hugged by a mechanical robot from becoming nightmare fodder. Unless you’re Shaun—he still wakes up screaming about zombie mice.

My point is, Disney has security that makes Fort Knox look like an amusement park. There’s no real danger involved. In fact, the series of sponsored vlogs from our 2021 trip to Walt Disney World, the Florida property, was pretty much a commercial for the safety of the re-opened park. Disney understands the importance of proper advertisement; and this wasn’t the first time they’d had to prove their ability to keep the metaphorical wolf from the door. Other people have compared the seismic shift in the country’s attitude toward security after The Rising to the one that came twenty years earlier, after 9/11. I won’t go into it here, except to say this: most places revoked their firearms bans when it became time to re-open. Disney knows forcing everyone to relinquish all weapons would likely do more psychological harm than good, but they require guns to be unloaded. For some, this takes them back to a safer world, a happier world. To others, particularly Irwins like my mother and brother, this is akin to torture. Give them Lowryland, where whole gangs of costumed adventuresome-types make keeping the dead away from the tourists look like part of the show. (For our report on corruption in the Lowry Corporations upper-management click here.) Note that neither park wants visitors getting in on the action. Isn’t it better to have a disinterested third party calling the shots? Depends on how you feel about faith, I guess.

Our parents chose a different type of vacation destination around the time Shaun and I reached amputation weight. Take from that what you will.

For those of you who think all the security theater is pointless, and what works in the outside world should be sufficient, let me leave you with this: The ban on loaded weapons at Disney came after the infamous incident where an off-duty zookeeper who’d lived the Rising out in a New Jersey suburb—a man who lost a parent in the Towers—shot at a park goer with Cerebral Palsy. She'd left her mobility aids at home for the first time in years; sure that at the Happiest Place Earth no one would mistake her for a zombie.

—From _Images May Disturb You_ , the blog of Georgia Mason December 5th, 2037

Until 2014 Walt Disney World only closed in the face of hurricanes. That’s why none of us questioned the fact that they would be shuttered due to Fiona—maybe they were being a little jumpy, but 75mph winds have a way of distracting even the most dedicated rooftop assassins. There used to be those who believed—with all of their ignorant hearts—that Disney controlled the weather in its parks. Whether they believed this involved in a Truman show-style dome that blended perfectly into the landscape, or forcefields that NASA satellites couldn’t detect, these people had clearly never been to Walt Disney World. Maybe the weather in Anaheim really did behave like someone with tech the government would kill for, and the few rain storms on property were done to make it seem like natural occurring weather patterns. In Orlando, it’s simply not possible. Here are the reasons why.

A. Disney fireworks are visible from the roofs of many buildings in the surrounding areas. in fact, for any celebration that brings back old-fashioned pyrotechnics, they offer experience packages that whisk visitors who are sensitive to sounds that sound like gunshot away to well-insulated restaurants and cocktail bars for a show that won’t cause amplification via heart attack. Why not simply retire the minor explosions in favor of the soundless beauty of a good laser show? It’s Disney—they made clinging onto the past into an art, no matter whose PTSD is triggered along the way.

B. A person interested in making money would not choose the weather that Walt Disney World is given. No way. The only people who profit from rainstorms at exactly 3pm every day are the poncho sellers, and while, sure, Disney does have an invested interest in Big Poncho, I guarantee you it does not replace what they lose every time people are forced to spend an hour waiting out a downpour in the Hall of Presidents lobby. Those stuck in the shops may buy more. Fun fact: All the Main Street stores were interconnected pre-Rising; it helped with crowd control, and kept the rain-stranded from going totally stir-crazy. Post-Rising? The shops were enlarged to allow people to pass in the aisle without accidentally touching a stranger, but they gave more than lip-service to the idea of each selling specialized wares. Meaning, if you got stuck in the Art of Disney during a storm, you could browse through prints and watch the artist-in-residence sketch as many of your faves as you wanted, but deciding to give into a hankering for Mouse-shaped ice cream meant giving up your spot in the air-conditioned store in favor of one of the poor sods huddled under the nearest awning, already wet, sure, but not soaked enough to want to cross the street in hopes of discovering that the Emporium could hold a party of three with a stroller. Yeah. No one was happy during those daily showers, except for the lucky few who knew when to hit up the gem of Main Street, post-Rising the Out of the Vault Cinema which claimed to offer the true movie theater experience! The parents who clung to pre-Rising memories of movie theaters willfully ignored the blood-tests built into arm rests, and the restraints that could be activated if any of the biometrics being monitored by the chair went wonky—much in the same way that their own parents pretended not to notice the less… PC aspects of films they loved as children. Let it be known, Out of the Vault Cinema followed each screening with a discussion of the film’s cultural context, but they also learned from their failures. 101 Dalmatians was sent back to the vault pretty quickly, as was Lady and the Tramp (a decision that had very little to do with the horrendously racist ‘I Am Siamese’ number, and more to do with the audiences tendency to be on the side of the villains who objected to allowing a dog in a baby nursery, no. matter how small the dog _looked_ ).

C. My friend Irina’s dad used to be an Imagineer, and he showed her the blueprints for a covered park that got sent to his department every year. They took up a whole file room. If we haven’t figured it out in our indoors-centric, anti-nature society, you really think they were close at a time when they actually had a park revolving around putting people into contact with big cats?

Yeah, no. The claim that the Walt Disney World Resort had weather-controlling abilities at any point is way less believable than the stories people told about Walt Disney having been cryogenically frozen, only to have the machinery break down during the Rising, allowing his corpse to thaw and make its way out onto the streets with the rest of the undead masses. Like being frozen would keep him alive enough to be infected with KA, and dead enough to amplify in time to have attacked some internet troll’s cousin’s wife’s hairdresser’s son.

I’ve info-dumped on you. I’m aware of that. Honestly, though, if you think _I’m_ bad, you should meet my brother. Alaric has to provide context before he asks you to pass the salt. The point is: Disney was susceptible to weather same as anywhere else. It would not magically be free of aedes aegypti, the blood-drinking, infection carrying asshole of a mosquito species responsible for transforming Florida from Hell-on-Earth to actual hell.

As a born-and-raised Floridian, I am allowed to say that. Anyone else attempting to mock my state better be willing to listen to a lecture on the socio-economic factors and unique information-sharing practices that led to the Sunshine State becoming the laughing stock of the country. Interested? I thought not.

No one mourned Florida. Not the way they did Alaska. Pre-Rising memes where Bugs Bunny cuts the state off the country still surface on social media. After the Masons and I smuggled out the infected mosquito out of the hazard zone, my brother’s —friend? Mentor? Aquaintence who sends him on occasional quests—mad scientist, Doctor Abbey, told me _aedes aegypti_ was the best case scenario.

“You got lucky, kid,” she told me. I watched her move the insect into a reinforced enclosure with one eye. The other I kept trained on the hallway. “Any other species, they’d have dropped bombs weeks ago.”

“Yeah.” A door separated Doctor Abbey’s lab from the living quarters. Any minute now my brother or his girlfriend—excuse me, finacée, Mom would say they’d gone from zero to jump without telling us—Maggie would come looking for me. Like I'd shot my way out of my own house, and spending six months with _the Masons,_ of all people, but I couldn’t handle anything Dr. Abbey threw at me.

With the mosquito secured, she became a gracious host and retrieved the apple juice I’d awkwardly requested. It reminded me of the first time Stacy cut the crusts off my PB&J. The fact that she’d noticed I picked them off at all revealed the mom in her. (My own mom gave me shit about missing out on the best part and ate the crust herself.) Doctor Abbey cared about people, the same way Stacy did. They’d been betrayed by the world in ways that made them repress those instincts. Would I grow up to be that type of person? Or would I be Maggie, who hid the cynicism beneath the caring?

“Can I ask you something?”

Her eyes lit up, and I knew that both my question and her answer would disappoint. She hadn’t asked about the way I walked, or the braces on my legs. She didn’t have to, anymore than I had to be told she studied reservoir conditions.

“I’ll, uh, let you take bloodwork or tissue samples, or whatever. I won’t tell Alaric.”

“All right.” She swung her desk chair around and took a sterile gloves off an empty terrarium. Iy question wouldn’t engage her interests. I was glad I’d thought of a way to mitigate her disappointment. The needle and vial came out of the pocket of her lab coat. I’d known this woman for twenty minutes, and this surprised me no less than the pistol Stacy once tugged out of her bra. “What’s your question?”

“Disney World. During the Rising, they bombed Comic Con, and Mall of America. Even Busch Gardens. Why’d Disney make it?”

Her eyebrows rose, but it looked more reflex than expression of surprise. “They did firebomb Disneyland. And didn’t that huge golf ball explode?”

I sighed. “A plane crashed into it. They’d already closed the park by that point.”

“There’s your answer. They shut the place down not long post-Comic Con.”

“Why? No one believed in KA yet. Until the military actually took action—.” Doctor Abbey shook her head, and I doubted it had anything to do with the ruby liquid flowing into her vial. “Let me guess: There’s more to it than that?”

Alaric’s favorite phrase. We heard it at the dinner table so frequently that Dorian and I said it with him, cued by a very specific muscle clench in our older brother’s jaw.

Next time he said it, should I mimic him alone, or would that make Dorian’s absence more obvious?

“There is. Before Marburg-Amberlee it wasn’t simply that we couldn’t _cure_ cancer. In most cases, our minimally-effective treatments were more brutal than the disease itself.”

“I’m thirteen, not three. We talked about poison therapy in elementary school virology.” That felt like a million years ago. Before Fiona. Before I shot my brother, and living in my school overshadowed my memories of attending it.

“Chemotherapy,” she corrected, wryly. “But you get it. Better than some of us did then, I think. It was a horrible thing for anyone to go through, at any age, but society reacts more strongly to the suffering of children. There were hundreds, thousands, of charities out there aimed at bettering the lives of kids with cancer. One of them, called Make-a-Wish, was particularly well-known. Their mission was basically what it says on the tin: granting the wishes of kids being subjected to the same medicines that wreaked havoc on adult bodies. I’m sure you can guess what one of the most common wishes was.”

“Going to Disney?”

“Bingo.” She took the needle out of my arm, and pressed a tiny wad of gauze to the prick point. “They got more requests for Orlando than Anaheim, but both were a popular choice. Not the worst idea. The parks were good at accommodating medical needs, even then. If nothing else, it gave the whole family a good memory. Amanda Amberslee and her mother spent a week in World, before she got her first dose of Marburg. For about a month, two photos floated around on the medical side of the internet. One of her there at your age,—this frail little girl, barely able to sit up in her wheelchair. The other, from her trip to the Land for Senior Night, riding Splash Mountain, hale and whole, arms thrown up in the air. They would’ve been the images that defined the decade, if the world hadn’t ended.”

“Wow. But what does that—”

“Impatience is genetic, huh? Let me tell my story. Hasn’t your brother taught the importance of recording the memories of the older generation, or whatever it is he does?”

I shrugged. I’d been seven when Alaric left home for college. I didn’t know a lot about his work, or how it differed from the Masons’ life of baiting the infected and manipulating public figures.

“Most of the Marburg trials were on the West Coast. Sloan-Kettering had a clinic, and Dana-Farber, for historical circularity. Aside from that, most programs were this side of the Rockies. As I’m sure you can imagine, the Make-a-Wish foundation kept the rigors of travel in mind when granting wishes. Logistics decided the Land vs. World question, providing the family didn’t have a preference.”

“So, you’re saying kids in the Marburg trials went to Disneyland?”

“In general.”

“What—” In my head, I heard Michael’s, gently instructing me to think it through. Stacy was more likely to snap answer; annoyed that I hadn’t grown up immersed in the world of Newsies and Irwins. I learned to pick who I asked which questions. “They amplified first.” In middle school, we were each assigned a city and told to map its outbreak. One of the facts we needed to report was the point it passed the CDC’s outbreak threshold. My friend Irina did Denver; they were really late Rising considering population and the fact that they had a Marburg trial. "Denver didn’t Rise until the second wave. A CDC employee contained the outbreak. Did someone with Marburg-Amberlee amplify at Disneyland?”

“Contain the outbreak. Is that what they say in textbooks?” Doctor Abbey's lips pursed like she’d taken a sip of expired apple juice. “At least they tell you something. Yes. In fact, there happened to be five park visitors that day who were part of a Marburg trial Two were the last recipients of a Make-A-Wish. The other three were survivors, maybe seeking to experience that happy place without the psychological and physical effects of cancer that overshadowed their initial trip. That, or they made a less cliché wish”

“Did…did they all amplify?”

“You know, there are those who theorize that pack behavior in the infecteds is the virus in one host communicating with the virus in another. It’s a sentience we associate with parasites more than viruses, but there are instances of spontaneous amplification that could be explained if certain strains…called…to their fellows. A bit woo-woo, even for me.”

So. _Yes. Yes, and we didn’t know why,_ and that scared the mad scientist.

“Okay, that’s why they bombed Disneyland. Does that mean there wasn’t an outbreak at Disney World?”

I’d never heard about one, but that didn’t mean much. The companies that survived tended to suppress any stories that would make it seem like they hadn’t been totally on the ball from the start.

“I didn’t say there wasn’t an outbreak,” Doctor Abbey said. I flinched harder than I had when her needle went into my arm. “Just that it didn’t lead to firebombing.”

“Oh.”

“You went pale, and there’s no way you would’ve offered me blood on the DL if you were a fainter. What gives?”

No matter how much she sounded like a robot programmed to say empathetic things, Doctor Abbey cared. Maybe I wouldn’t have understood that six months earlier, before I travelled the country with Michael and Stacy Mason. Now, it was easier to be honest knowing how many other things the person listening would rather be doing—because they wouldn’t be bothering to listen to me if they didn’t think I mattered.

“My mom was there. She went to UWF—University of West Florida. So, I always thought…. But she was doing Disney College Program for the summer and fall semesters. Dad told us his Rising story. He and his roommate, my uncle Dorian, ditched a summer psych class to drive up I-10 and retrieve a bunch of guns from Uncle Dorian’s dad’s hunting camp. They ended up staying in rural Alabama. A bunch of other stranded UWF students joined them up there. I figured Mom was with him… And it’s like, he used to joke that his Rising was very _Shaun of the Dead._ Why did Mom never mention that she lived through _Zombieland_ … Unless….” Unless she couldn’t joke about it. Unless she blurted it out the day before Fiona because the universe was reminding her of the last time her life fell apart.

She said it before going outside to help Dad close the storm shutters. I’d planned to ask her more about it once the storm blew through. I’d only just begun to see my parents as people with feelings, who’d had a life before my brothers and I were born. I'd never thought much about the Pre-Rising world; where our 10,000 person village had been one neighborhood in a city with three hospitals, an army base, and a naval base—ideal in any other emergency. I’d never really wondered what it would've been like to find out about KA in the middle of an outbreak, not from Doctor Matras’s infamous video.

“ _Zombieland_ is not entirely a wonky romp through an amusement park, but I get your meaning,” Doctor Abbey said. “I wish I had something wise to tell you, but I prefer truths: you’re probably not going to know what happened to your mom that summer. What that means for you, well.... That’s up to you.”

“Yeah. I guess. Um. You know there’s nothing very different about my blood, right?”

“You know reservoir conditions are my specialty, right?”

“Want to do spinal tap?”

This time her raised eyebrows were surprise, then she held up a hand, as if pushing away the temptation. “A tip, kid. Don’t start this arrangement off by lying to him. He’s going to want to protect you, and he’s going to make a lot of decisions out of guilt for not being there. If you don’t want him to see you as a kid, don’t start by making a kid’s mistakes.”

“I am a kid, though.”

She met my eyes, and for a second I wished the KA had chosen a different home in my body; giving me eyes that couldn’t be read. Then she stood. “Come on. Let’s go interrupt the reunion. Maybe we’ll find your medical proxy in a giving mood.”

Whatever she’d been looking for in my gaze, she hadn’t found it. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

* * *

“If we’re going to claim that a loss of oncological knowledge is the reason we cannot rid the world of Kellis-Amberlee, we damned well be willing to put every speck of information about this virus out into the world. Isn’t refusing to explain things how we got into this mess in the first place?”

Doctor Shannon Abbey

“Theater is ephemeral. To experience it, you have to disconnect from your surroundings. It’s hard enough for someone to do that without being afraid that the person next to them is going to tear their throat out with his teeth.”

Geoffrey Tennant

The name of the company originated by Canadian actor Geoffrey Tennant, and his wife Ellen Fairchild, is far more Shakespearian that it may seem. It is both a pun dependent on pronunciation, and a commentary on humanity’s relationship to mortality. Apparently this was a common trick of the Bard’s.

“Like ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’” Ellen Fairchild says in an interview uploaded to the company’s blog circa 2021. Once the lead actress at the New Burbage Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Fairchild was the spokeswoman for the first acting troupe to emerge after the Rising. “Contemporarily, it would’ve been said more like Much Ado about Not’ing—i.e. making notes--which relates to the theme of eavesdropping and rumor. Whether such gossip is “nothing” is a question each production seeks answers. Finally, at the time, you might also hear ‘much ado about an o-thing,’ an o-thing at the time being slang for a woman’s—”

“Ellen!” Her husband, who had been sitting quietly while his wife flirted with the camera, leans forward in his chair and cups her knee. His hand is gnarled with the effects a life lived intensely. “The point is that Théâtre A is Théâtre “A” as in, alpha, as in the first of its kind. It is ‘Théâtre eh?’ an acknowledgement of our roots, and it is Théâtre et…, Théâtre et what, you ask? Et mort. Et zombies, if you must, although we work hard to ensure their lack.

“Finally, and most importantly, Théâtre is. Théâtre Est. Théâtre exists. Even our security workers are actors, donning costumes that help our true patrons feel reassured, not put in further danger—a feeling, I assure you, traditionally dressed mercenaries can still evoke.”

“Honestly, I think he’s pushing it with that last one,” Ellen cuts in. The first times I watched this video, I found it easy to ignore one of them whenever the other spoke. Their presences were that engaging. To do so is a mistake. Their facial expressions give incredible amounts of credence to the claim that acting is reacting; though a little bit of background research proves that they genuinely enchant each other.

“Not unlikely,” Tennant allows, bringing her thin fingers to his lips. “It was Ellen’s idea, originally. We’d gotten stranded at the Festival—”

“Avignon, not Edinburgh,” Ellen cuts in.

“Right. We took a passel of interested students there every couple of years; got them engaged in international theater without a language barrier. The obnoxious Quebecquois kids pretending not to understand a French accent aside. There were some unusual places that rented themselves out as hostels. That year, we were in an elementary school. Four connected buildings open to a courtyard. One entrance, which made it defensible, and the bathrooms were outside which built the kids' nerves up fast.” He lifts one corner of his lip up in a not-quite smile. One that belies his casual attempt to wave off the first days of a new world.

“There was some…excitement,” Ellen offers. “We lost… Lost some good kids. Wonderful actors. Shannon. I couldn’t wait for her Ophelia. And we wouldn’t have made it without Anna.”

“The inimitable Anna!” Geoffrey roars, in a way that makes it clear that he brought houses down as the kings of yore. “The things that woman has done in her life. Seriously, if you haven’t read Pause in La Paz… and that’s _before_ she trained an army of teenagers to fight zombies.”

“I do think she should’ve gone with a different title,” Ellen murmurs. “Sorry! I just—Pause in La Paz? But yes. Anna saved our lives. Theater saved our minds. Once it became clear that we’d be staying in one place for more than a few days... Not everyone could be part of supply runs, obviously. That simply wouldn’t work. And nearly everyone alive in the area had been there for the theater….”

“The first few productions were chaos. Someone would move in the wrong way, and the person next to them would be sure they were spontaneously amplifying. It’s not like we understood how rare that actually was.”

“Sometimes, we thought that it wasn’t going to work. That something had finally ended theater’s power over humanity. Made it impossible to transport people out of their own minds, without the barrier of a screen, or a camera.” Geoffrey leans forward and runs his hands through his hair. Anyone who has watched the documentary footage that the New Burbage produced during his brief tenure as Artistic Director would recognize the despair in the gesture. “The truth of it is this: I know what it is to lose touch with reality. To have my mind broken by the sheer wretchedness of my current existence. It seems impossible that anything before the Rising could be worth breaking down over, but then that’s part of what we do. We portray humanity as it was, without the fear that overshadows everything—Though of course, there is great fear in our shows. There is great love. We refuse to let people believe that the only experiences that matter must directly involve the infected. Death has always been one of the key concerns of the human condition—a huge concern; one that can have all kinds of effects on the psyche. But it’s not all that there is, or all that will be.”

Tennant’s eyes are shining at the end of this speech, and he clears his throat into his hand several times. He does not speak again. The tears do not fall.

From _Preserve and Perserver_ the blog of Alisa Kwong, April 23rd, 2047

The pub, some would say, felt like a Disney World model of a Victorian pub. The fact that it existed in a medium-sized town in Eastern Canada could be the beginning of a deliberation on colonialism; and what it says that a country with an indigenous-majority in its government—one that claimed its independence midway through the Rising-- holds onto the trappings of two colonial powers.

I might have been the one to write it if I A. Had any kind of a right to be involved in that discussion, or B. was not contractually forbidden from posting my current whereabouts on the internet. No matter that I had a recurrent feature on Théâtre A performances around the world. If the cast of Cymbeline stayed more or less the same for the next month, I would post my write-up. Any sooner than that, I risked putting my companions in danger, something no one associated with After the End Times would ever do.

“And we’re back,” said a voice to my right.

“Sorry about that,” added the one on my left.

I closed my eyes for a second, transported back in time to a blur of dry, New Mexico afternoons spent sharing my obsession with amusement parks on a feed watched by thousands, while at night, when the cameras went off, the Masons did their best to help me deal with the after-effects of the Second Rising. They didn’t know what it was like to grow up thinking that the virus was simply a fact of life. For uncontrolled infected to be a bogeyman, not a true possibility— _take off that band-aid the infected will find you! Go into those woods, and you’ll be food for an infected raccoon!_ \--They had been faced with the unexpected amplification of people they loved. They’d had to fire guns they’d never picked up outside of a range. They’d had their whole world fall apart around them, and kept going, as the situation got worse.

They’d understood my trauma, and gotten me through it in a way I knew Alaric and Maggie, as much as I loved them, would have balked at. Not that I ever told them that. I became a helpful, ambitious ward; manageable for a newlywed couple with a baby and a repudiation for uncovering international conspiracies. Not to say I wasn’t willful, or that our lives were anything close to perfect. They were just…easier than they would’ve been if there hadn’t been a months-long interlude between my rescue from the refuge came and my return to my brother.

Of course, the voices flanking me in refurbished theater bar outside of Montreal weren’t Stacy and Michael Mason—though they were Masons. Specifically, they were Shaun and Georgia Mason, the children of my saviors, and the proof that every child has a different experience with their parents. Not that Michael and Stacy were my parents, exactly. I’d seen them maybe three times since I moved into Maggie’s place. But, in a world where parents could become monsters wanting to eat you, you took what you could get.

“It’s no problem,” I told the Masons. The younger Masons. Shaun and Georgia. “Babysitter issues?”

They rolled their eyes in perfect unison. “Nah, the babysitter is great,” Shaun said. “After what we went through as kids, we’ve character checked the hell out of all twelve eligible teenagers and retired teachers in the area.”

“One of the reasons she’s great is that she understands why Bex video calls us as part of her bedtime routine,” Georgia followed up. Their ability to finish each others sentences reminded me of the video that’d been my introduction to Théâtre A; the way the founders had seemed to be mesmerized by each others thoughts. I’d had a few relationships over the years. Enough to know I mostly preferred ladies; though one of my partners had been enby, and if Nandini Gupta’s younger brother looked at me during the two years we overlapped at Reed, I’d have adjusted my Kinsey number accordingly. 

As much as I liked to believe Arjun and I were MFEO, I hadn’t come close to that level of synergy with anyone.

“Stacy told me about that,” I said. Georgia’s smile tightened, and Shaun put two fingers on the back of her hand. As a kid, I’d have shut up then, not ever willing to cause the great Georgia Mason discomfort, but we talked through that at a AtET reunion the year I started college. They couldn’t claim to understand the effects of The Rising if they didn’t acknowledge how deeply those traumas affected their parents.

“You know she pulled footage from your home surveillance tapes that day, and made sure that girl never worked in child-care again, right?” I asked.

“How’d that affect her ratings?”

“She never mentioned it again. Don’t you think she would have, if she did it to bring in views?”

Georgia shrugged, and I took a long pull from my beer. We would never totally agree on who their parents were, but I knew part of that was that I wasn’t a Mason. I was an outsider who’d been rescued by heroes of the Rising, an observer, true, but a biased one. I’d also been let in by both Michael and Stacy in a way their children never were.

“You know, I vlogged for the first few years I was home with Philip.” Stacy had told me one night in the living room of a hotel suite somewhere in Arizona. I’d awoken from a dream where I was checking tickets at the entrance to the Magic Kingdom, only to look up into the eyes of a bloody-lipped zombie. Still awake, going over the day’s footage, she’d made me a mug of hot milk and settled us both back on the couch.

“It wasn’t what it is now, but YouTube had been around a few years. No one is more desperate for human connection, and feels more guilty about it, than a woman at home with a baby. Talking to a camera that’s aimed at the baby is a relatively fair compromise. The community I found was so great, so supportive, at first.”

“What changed?” I'd asked, too young to understand the power of waiting in silence.

Her eyes widened, and I knew I’d hit a tripwire. Before I could backtrack; she put her mug down and pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth.

“Not many people know this, but Philip…. He wasn’t…. He had some delays. For the most part, they only manifested in his speech, but there were other….” She took a shaky breath, and I played with the velcro on my left leg brace, the one I had to wear to be able to walk at all. “Some of the moms were wonderful. They assured me that kids all develop at different speeds. That their oldest didn’t talk until he turned four, and they couldn’t make them stop now. That if he did end up with some kind of diagnosis, it didn’t mean anything about what his life would be like. I knew reasonably that they were the ones to listen to, but…”

“But you should never read the comments."

She nodded. “I felt so guilty, all the time. Sure that if I’d done one thing differently…. but I fu—screwed up.”

“You can say fuck around me.”

“No, honey, I can’t. There are things… Certain things that if I let go of them…. I’ll be letting go of being a mom.” Of being _his_ mom, she meant. Didn’t she?

“What made it different? After?”

“With Shaun and Georgia? Well. I had attachment issues. I know that. Not being able to bond immediately with them—no matter what the adoption literature said about that being far from abnormal—I was sure that it meant I’d never loved Philip, either. Not really. And that brought back all the guilt I felt over what happened. I made the ultimate choice for my child, and it was the right one. I made it out of love. Because I had to. But that’s all rational. Irrationally, I felt sure I was a monster, an evil creature who playacted at being maternal until an opportunity came. I deserved punishment. I deserved to have these two, wonderful, bright children, and not be able to connect to them. My love was toxic, after all.

“It’s all very tangled and dark, but the crux of it is that I was afraid. I was afraid to let myself love them. All the excuses I gave… Shaun came to us talking, but to be thrilled by that would’ve been disloyal to Philip. Georgia sat quietly, calculating, always thinking, and finding that a nice change was disloyal to Philip. Feeling like I could deal with Shaun’s energy because it was more like his brother… You get it. And I didn’t tell Michael any of this. I worried that he’d use it as a way to take them away from me. No matter how cold I let myself be, that loss would destroy me.

“So what does all that have to do with the cares of commenters on Cucamonga?” She shook her head. “It didn’t matter. What anyone thought of my parenting, no matter how much I probably needed to hear it; it didn’t matter, because I’d already done the worst, most selfish, and most selfless thing a parent can possibly do. What did anything else matter?”

Again, silence. Not my thing. “It matters because they’re different kids!”

I didn’t know how I expected Stacy to react to that. I’d seen her blow up at a waiter for having his gun holster too close to a kid in a highchair. I knew her anger could be powerful. Her sadness, too, had kept us in one place for several days, making the hotel bedrooms dark, no matter how much light came in through open curtains. What I never would’ve expected was her amusement.

“You make that…” she gasped once the almost hysterical laughter calmed. “You make it sound so… so simple! But sweetheart, I was Stacy Mason. Philip Mason’s mother. The first Irwin. Letting go of the past was the one thing no one was ever going to let me do.”

Years later, and hundreds of miles away, I debated telling that story to her children. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Stacy’s name had gone on the wall in 2044, and Michael’s followed just long enough after that those of us who cared had just stopped calling him every three hours. He’d always been too good at convincing people things would be okay.

I didn’t. There were times that I had confronted Georgia and Shaun over our different understandings of their parents, but this didn’t have to be one of them. Instead, I happily took the phone Shaun handed me and swiped through to look at pictures of Bex and Gellar; the kids they’d taken in via Protectors of the Resistant, an underground organization that focused on looking out for people who manifested reservoir conditions and their loved ones. The foster/adopt program was one of many that it ran thanks to funds that would never be traced back to AtET.

“You’ve made my month, you realize that,” I said, once we’d finished our drinks and Shaun quipped about how lame and domestic they’d become. “Possibly my year, depending on what kind of interviews I can squeeze from this.”

“Don’t worry,” Georgia said, a smile flitting across her face. “We have contacts for you. Just—”

“Post immediately after each interview? Got it, boss.”

She reached up to cuff the back of my head. I watched her face change, two small wrinkles appearing on either side of her mouth. People complained about not being able to see Georgia’s eyes, and the continuing prejudice against Retinal KA was clear to all. Bex came to them believing she’d amplify before adulthood, because the infecteds' were only other eyes she’d seen like hers. Even though the in-person time I’d spent with Georgia was likely measurable in days, I’d never considered her to be anything other than expressive.

Her hand went from playfully smacking me to pushing a lock of hair behind my ear, a gesture that made it clear she’d become a mom. “Still having those dreams?”

I shrugged. She’d know what it meant. That I still closed my eyes and opened them serving plates of entrails to zombified princesses at Cinderella’s table, or fastening a seatbelt across a Test Track rider who preceded to bite my arm, or scooping popcorn covered in blood into a plastic bucket commemorating Duffy the Disney Bear.

“If we could get you in there, we would, you know that?”

This time, I nodded. It probably didn’t mean she’d be any more likely to believe me.

I don’t know how Georgia originally found out about my nightmares. Over the years, I’d shared late nights with nearly everyone who came to After the End Times reunions, even Sanjukta, the year she broke her arm, and it kept waking her up. Eventually everyone knew about them, but she understood them best. She’d been the one to actually put effort into determining what my mom might have been doing that summer. The shortlist also represented my most common dreams. The conclusion we’d come to was that if records existed, they were onsite somewhere. Onsite, somewhere no one had been in fifteen years. Somewhere not even the bravest Irwin would go.

I was not an Irwin. I wasn’t a Newsie or a fictional, either. When asked, I called myself a Maddow, not just because of the whole gay icon thing. After the Rising, Rachel shifted away from mainstream media and politics, and created in-depth slice-of-life reports, and deep dives into the changes going on to bring industries up to standard in this new world. She covered changes in culture that emerged from people getting stuck far from home, and made an effort to fight xenophobia by celebrating refuge contributions to the country. All of this, armed mostly with a microphone and a Bowie knife; her wife running the camera—and if more than a few of her pieces focused on post-Rising art, particularly one artist, well. She registered her biases.

Her reports had still focused on the Rising. On the infected. On bringing the world “back;” not considering what deserved to be kept. That’s what I did. Or what I tried to do. Alaric called me a “Siskel,” Maggie reminded him about the work I put into following social justice causes and argued for “Steinem.” Sometimes I wondered if they purposefully avoided “Chung,” or “Hockenberry,” and how I felt about that. Privately, I wanted to be called a “Gilmore." Gilmore girls was one of my favorite pieces of pre-Rising TV, and since they never got to film the reunion, it ends with Rory dreaming of being the next Christine Amanpour. She doesn’t know how she’ll get there, but to start she’s covering the presidential campaign. I knew what I was aiming for—vaguely, no one can be the next anyone—but I couldn’t foresee the steps I would take to get there.

My nibling’s contribution to the debate was, “Why does everyone gotta be called a label like that?” which frankly made more sense than most of the über-specific categories that’d been invented in the past ten years.

I spent the night at Shaun and Georgia’s cabin that night, and expected to be woken up by two jam-handed kids, who could probably convince Shaun to make waffles. Instead, my bone-implant phone woke me while the light was still grey.

“‘Lo?”

“Shit, Alisa, where are you? What time is it?”

“Mahir? “s like 5:30am. I’m… I’m at my cousin’s. Why?” He swore again into the phone, and that clued me in to his location. “You’re Down Under this week, and you forgot about time zones.”

“Yeah. Jack and Olivia can’t make me do this more than once every fifteen tears, but there’s a whole debate going down about the emus and the koalas that I’m pretty sure you have to be here to half-understand. Anyway, that’s not got anything to do with why I called. Well, except for the fact that it came up in conversation with a British ex-pat last night.”

“What came up?”

“Your next assignment, love. Uncle Mahir has a story for you, and I think you’re going to love it.”

I let him give me the details, recording them to listen over in daylight, thanked him as graciously as I could at five-freaking-thirty, and went back to sleep.

An hour later, two kids with maple syrup on their hands woke me up.

_The garden at the UK pavilion is lush and green. I’m assigned to the China pavilion because of my parents’ nationality, but I spent so much of my adolescence fighting their culture that to represent it now feels like a lie. I come here to remind myself that I’m nothing more than an employee at a theme park, not an ambassador to the US from a country my parents fled. Someone comes up the garden path, and I remember reading online about people scattering ashes here. It happens most often at MK, on the Haunted Mansion, and it’s a small world, which I suppose means people want their relatives to be tortured into eternity. Why did the sound of someone shuffling toward me make me think of death? How morbid, for a beautiful day, in a beautiful place. I bring the smile they’ve coached me in to my face—holding it doesn’t take much effort—and turn to face a man whose teeth are lined with red the way a child’s might be outlined in the brown of a chocolate bar. I think what he has in his hand is a turkey leg, but no, it’s an arm, a bleeding arm, ripped from a socket, broken bone hanging out of torn flesh, and he throws it aside to lung for me—_

I startled awake on a train out of Heathrow airport, headed for Oxford. The people seated near me eye me, and I catch one pushing a discrete button under his arm rest.

Sometimes I really regretted all the time I’d spent watching footage of Disney World in the 2010s, especially the play-through of a pre-Rising game that had players hunting zombies in Disneyland. That had taken the dreams to a whole new level.

A second later, here came a conductor with a tea trolley and a blood-test. Everything was very calm and _If you don’t mind, miss,_ but it didn’t make me feel any less singled out or harassed. The adrenaline it caused at least counteracted the last of the airline’s sedatives in my body. By the time I checked into the narrow-roomed hotel on George Street I was mostly sure I would be able to avoid jet-lag by staying awake through to sunset, at least.

I did lie down for a few minutes, to give my body a chance to recover from the plane seat. Cerebral-Spinal KA was clinically pretty similar to spina bifida; in fact, I’d known people who claimed that as their diagnosis in public. None of the security guards with access to their medical files ever contradicted them. It was an unfair privilege that people with retinal KA didn’t have. I’d never done it, but I got it. When the end result was always riding in a wheelchair through the airport for your “convenience”—aka to avoid increasing the anxiety of your fellow passengers who are ableist enough to see _unsteady_ and think _infected_ —why deal with the glares you’re going along with the program to avoid?

Digression, I have never outgrown thee.

I’m lucky, to be honest. I don’t have the bladder issues that can come with both disorders, I generally only need my braces to walk, although sometimes crutches help. Other reservoir conditions are more obvious, or require more accommodations. I don’t have to worry about passing KA via any fluid other than my blood. If only I didn’t know that people like me had been literally hunted down by government-funded organizations.

Sure, my brother and the gang of intrepid reporters who raised me took care of that, but new virologists graduated every year. Whose to say one outlier wouldn’t trace the same threads the CDC had, and… and what? Enough people with reservoir conditions had survived with the help of organizations like Shaun and Georgia’s that the rumors surrounding immunity were considered to hold slightly more weight than an urban legend. We weren’t going to be kidnapped and forced to give our captors immunity any time soon—at least, not en masse. Crazies were always trying some insane way of getting “immune,” and true medical science had no influence on that.

I didn’t like to think about that stuff, especially because the existence of my reservoir condition kept me from being the kind of reporter who could do something about it. After even following the presidential campaign led to the death and/or disappearance of four journalists and one presidential candidate—if you’ve never heard about the Kilbourne campaign, well, I know Shaun and Georgia highjacked those feeds, but it’s important history for those of us who wouldn’t sell our values out for an opportunity. Like I’ve said, the Masons and I don’t agree on everything. Generally, I’ve been happy creating deep-dives on pre-Rising cultural touchstones, and investigating the art and traditions emerging in our world, particularly when the two overlap.

For instance, Disney World was built to celebrate a very white, colonialist ideal of America that made no room for a revisionist view. After the Rising, everyone wanted to go back to this place that was supposed to be the epitome of pre-Rising American society, but the amount of globalization that happened when our most important invention came out of a country that no longer existed—meaning that we owed our lives to refuges; a truth that made more than a few far-right leaning politicians short circuit. KA’s refusal to ignore socio-economic standing, its colorblindness, brought way more changes than the old guard wants to admit, and those who were left at Disney knew it. So, there was a lot of careful editing done. Editing that might have been forgotten about if I hadn’t been around to compare footage taken by visitors on either side of the re-opening.

Bringing cultural awareness to a world on the brink of caring more about the dead than the living was worth a few vivid nightmares.

Off to the Bodleian library. All of the Oxford colleges have long since been cleared and refurbished, but they say that the Bod was never breeched. Throughout the summer of 2014, and the years that followed, a select group known as the Librarians—some students, some actual librarians, some who never said—put themselves in charge of protecting the library: reading rooms, stacks, administrative offices. All of it. They let people come in and read, but per the rules, no books owned by the Bodley could leave it. To protect themselves against theft, and their patrons from venturing out on treacherous days, the Librarians collected volumes from the Blackwell’s across the street, from the Waterstones at the end of the road, from the used bookstores on High Street and the separate libraries at the colleges, where they would otherwise have been left to disintegrate along with the hoodie-clad dead who’d once turned their pages. Those books they lent out. Those books sometimes got returned with dirt and blood staining their pages.

There wasn’t the kind of surveillance then to confirm the claim that an outbreak never reached the library, but in the thirty years since no one has ever reported finding a stain that hadn’t been reported in the records well before July 2014.

I made my way to the Radcliffe Camera, where I’d been given strict instructions to follow, via Mahir’s source, an ex-pat friend of his friend Juliet.

“Can I see your Bod card, love?” the assistant behind the shatter-proof glass asked me, before I’d pressed my hand against the unobtrusive blood-testing panel. I blinked at them, surprised at the order of things.

“Your status doesn’t matter if you haven’t got a card,” they explained. Unable to argue with that, I took a breath to prepare myself for the interaction I’d expected to come after a blood test, and some nursery rhyme recitation.

“My name is Alisa Kwong,” I stated, holding out my credentials. “Temporary blogger’s license number india-golf-uniform-dash-one-zero-one-seven-one. I’m here at the invitation of Novitiate Librarian Housman who has arranged for me to meet Librarian Donoghue this morning.”

The guard didn’t move until I’d finished the whole spiel, and I wondered if they thought I should also be presenting them with a token of some sort and whispering “valar morghulis.”

They slid my paperwork through to read it, and then slid it back. “Wait right there, love.”

I obeyed, shifting my weight a couple of times, and glancing at the blood testing pad. Had I ever gone so long between entering a building’s threshold and doing a blood test, unless it took one to get in?

After long enough to make me consider turning around and going home in time for Maggie’s annual Memorial Day party that weekend—so maybe five minutes—the guard reappeared, followed by—

Well. I didn’t look at her and think librarian, and yet, I could see Librarian. She was about my age, of average height, but a build that was firmly muscled. She wore dark-washed jeans, a leather jacket that definitely had kevlar sewn in, and boots that clicked against the stone floor with every step. Behind her thin-framed glasses, I saw an intelligence, one that spoke of someone who spent a lot of time in stories. It reminded me of the fictionals who hung out at Maggie’s regular movie nights and salons. Some of them were just as ready for an adventure as Irwins, and others took shuttles from their door to Maggie’s without ever looking outside. All of them shared that gleam.

“Heya,” she said, in an accent far thicker than anything I’d heard in my four whole hours in England. “I’m Librarian Donoghue. Let my friend Morgan here get your status and I can show you what we’re about.”

I’d never slammed my hand onto a testing pad which such force.

Librarian Donoghue led me through the main reading room, to a door that led to a flight of stairs that spiraled downward. I stiffened, ready for the slog, but to my surprise, she turned into a tiny nook, where an elevator door stood open.

“What do you know about the Bodleian, Ms. Kwong?”

“Oh, um, it’s Alisa.”

“Brilliant. I’m Kylie.”

“O-okay, well. Um. I know that it’s like the Library of Congress?” Wow Alisa, words much? Not like you’re an internationally known blogger or anything! “In that it’s one of six places where all books copyrighted in the UK were deposited, Pre-Rising. It’s one of three that is confirmed to have retained higher than 95% of the collection Post-Rising, and two to have 98% verified.”

“The other being?”

“Trinity College, Dublin,” I answered quickly, suddenly very aware of the provenance of her accent.

“You did do your homework,” she said. Obviously she didn’t know many journalists; that was the tip of the iceberg of research I’d done. “I trained at Trinity. Obviously the two didn’t work together during the Rising, but both managed to preserve their collections, so once Irish Independence was granted —officially, though I’m sure discussions between libraries predated all the politics—the groups that formed at both libraries began merging techniques. We’re called Palladins at Trinity, which I honestly prefer.”

“It’s more badass,” I agreed. “But why…? I mean, what…?”

“What do we bring to a Post-Rising Bodleian with blood kits at every carrel and the college libraries resupplied and opened?”

“More or less.”

“So glad you asked.” She waved a hand, and elevator doors opened with timing that made me think that Palladin might really have been appropriate. “Follow me.”

We started down a hallway, but the more I considered the map of the reading room in my head, the more I wondered: “Are we underground?”

The thrilled smile she gave me made my hands clench against my recorder, and I hoped one of the five cameras I had on or around me—hair clip, top button, in my bag, hovering lens that trailed a receptor clipped to my purse strap, and the one I actually held—caught it.

“Rumors of a tunneling system below Oxford have existed for centuries, of course. There was a small network connecting five houses in the Jewish Quarter, and it’s never been unusual for libraries to keep their stacks in basements. Other networks were designed for servants or messengers to get between important buildings, and of course The Bod used them to move books between reading rooms. What’s unique here is that the Rising gave us a chance to…improve upon the tunnels we had here. We also used that as an opportunity to improve the collection.”

“What do you—Oh.” We’d stepped into a room that reminded me of the hub in Wreck-it Ralph. An open circular room, with corridors—tunnels?—branching off in every direction. The hub was furnished with rows of desks, each of them holding a computer and printer. Librarians sat at the computers, scanning the screen, and printing documents. Others stood at tables working machines that bound the documents and those stacks were taken to other desks, for cataloging, I assumed.

“What are you printing?” I asked, although I could see some of the screens well enough to know.

“This way.” She led me off to a nook along the wall where a cluster of mismatched, but incredibly soft, chairs were clustered around a tea station. Similar nooks were scattered all over the room, and in many of them Librarians sat reading, or chatting to their fellows. I let her make me a cup, because I sensed she needed it before she told me whatever her superiors had decided the world needed to know.

Once both of us were sitting the chairs with novelty mugs advertising mostly pre-Rising media--although Guilia Ghost Hunter was one of Maggie’s fictional’s serials that got turned into a show--her head tilted thoughtfully. “Alisa, will you think me forward if I admit that I know parts of your story?”

I snorted. “Girl— You okay with that?” She nodded. “Girl, I know who I used to live with. People who spent five minutes on a Mason video are famous. I spent weeks traveling with them, and being made into a poster-child for the plight of Children of the Second Rising.”

“Actually, I…well, I did watch the Masons then, but I actually found you again a few years later. You reported on Théâtre A’s production about the parallels between the abandoning of Alaska and Florida, right?”

I nodded.

“I created an archive for them, since I knew the playwright.”

“You—That was part of the hook--no one knew Amber Newbourne’s true identity.”

“Mm, well. I had an ex- who knew that I could access locked databases and enlisted me to make sure the nom de plume wasn’t traceable. Public information and the right to privacy are two very different concepts.”

“Agreed, but I… never mind. So you found my coverage of the Théâtre. And?”

“And I liked what you had to say. Then I realized you were the Alisa who the Masons got out of Florida, and I remembered the details of your story. The part technology played in it, specifically.”

“You mean having to send emails into the void via my e-diary? Yeah, not great.”

“That, and the way you talked about how important it was that the school library still had books. I knew you understood the necessity of both mediums.” She shifted, leaning forward over her knees to bring herself close enough for me to see the red strands in her golden hair. “In the first Rising, d’you know how close we came to losing the Internet all together?”

“Less than people think, but it would’ve been harder to revive than commonly believed, too.”

That pleased smile returned. “And the percentage of the Internet that was wiped?”

“By 2018 at least 35% of sites online as of July 2014 were totally inaccessible, and an additional 10% expired in the next five years.”

“And that’s nothing compared to the amount of local networks that were lost due to equipment failure. Records of all kinds were lost.”

A part of my mind flashed to a mythical file room in a waterlogged building on Bay Lake. If they’d stored their information digitally, would it be gone? Could it be accessed? I didn’t have Alaric’s skill at hacking, but I’d never—

_Focus, Alisa._

“And so here you guys are, what, trying to _print_ the _Internet_?”

Her laugh was positively melodious.

“Not quite. We are making hardcopies of digitally published accounts of The Rising, prominent blogs, self-published books with higher numbers than their traditionally-published counterparts. I know it doesn’t look like it, but what we’re mostly focused on is creating accessible back-ups, and protections for digital media that could otherwise be lost. For instance, a lot of vlogs were lost because the sites that hosted them disappeared; due to equipment failure, or the owners of the site becoming infected. How many names should have been added to the Wall? How much pre-Rising culture will be lost to the generations who no longer remember a zombie-free world?

“Before the Rising, we believed the Internet was forever, but the truth is, we came very close to losing it. Were another widespread disaster to lead to mass server failure, how much of our world would disappear, when we spend so much of it online?”

All of this was right up my alleyway, but the first thought that came to me was: “How much information about KA would be lost?”

“There is that,” Kylie said. In three words she managed to make me certain that she shared my mindset, the one that prioritized humanity over the dead. I simply couldn’t turn off the other part of me that knew how far powerful people would go to shape the world to their liking—how easy would it be for a faction in the CDC to manipulate some kind of climate disaster, this one to wipe out AtET reporting of previous conspiracies. _Documents or it didn’t happen!_

“What’s the goal?”

“Universal access. Our servers will be mirrored and the public will have access both to the files we’ve salvaged, and the books that were digitized during the Rising. In return, we hope people will send us their own salvaged files—media saved before The Rising, the how-to articles they printed before that site became inaccessible. Handwritten journals. Letters. We’ll digitize it and return the files to them; outsourcing if necessary. We know that there no way to save everything produced during or after the Rising any more than we can recreate what came before, but we can make it easier for future generations to keep information from being lost.

“Every document printed is available in at least one other location—this isn’t between Trinity and Oxford anymore, either. Seventy institutions are involved worldwide, with move expressing interest via word of mouth. We’ve had some museums ask to be part of the network, too.

“The thing is, libraries have never been against digitizing information. People want to make it a fight over digital versus print, but if we want to make information as available as possible, we have to make space for both.”

“Wow. Wow, that’s… It’s amazing. Just…. Honestly, it sounds like the sanest thing I’ve ever heard.”

She arched her neck back to let out a delighted laugh, and then leaned her head on one hand. “Can I show you something?”

“You can show me everything.”

She laughed. “In good time. I promise, we want to give you all the access you need to sell this to the world.” She stood and had rinsed out both of our mugs before I could get out of the comfy chair. Then, she led me through yet another door, into an office that made me sure that powering this underground undertaking must take all the sun England got in a year.

The UI on the program she opened looked clean, but I didn’t get much time to consider that. Not with the face framed on the screen.

For a second I could have been looking in a mirror, except my nose end way too long to be described as “button” and I had my dad’s high cheekbones. Alaric had been the one to get Mom’s apple-round cheeks, which were more pronounced in 2014.

“She used a video site that’s defunct, but between various caches and restoration of physical backups we retrieved the majority of the archive. I checked, and your mom’s vlog isn’t missing anything.”

“Oh.” The sound was the result of inhaling and exhaling at the same time.

“She doesn’t go into detail. NDA, probably but... You, uh… There’s no way to talk around the fact that I read your blog is there?”

I shook my head, still staring at my mom’s twenty-one-year-old face.

“You talk about wanting to know what happened to her that day. And about wishing you could be an Irwin. It doesn’t take a lot to figure out that you want to investigate for yourself, am I right?”

I nodded. She could probably have gotten me to tell her the truth about anything just then, but I appreciated the way she checked in.

“I might know someone. The girl I mentioned earlier, actually. She’s an Irwin. Former. She’s been off-the-grid for a long time, but parachuting into hazard zones in search of treasure has kind of become her bread and butter in the past ten years or so. She’s done some retrieval work for us, actually. It’s how we reconnected. I knew her in Ireland. We… well, we were together, but I wasn’t as ready to fight for what I wanted then.”

“But you are now?” I asked, looking back to meet her eyes.

“Now? Other people’s ignorance won’t stop me from clinging onto my truths with every fiber of my being.”

I nodded, once, and thought of that night, years ago, when Stacy Mason had told me something that sounded similar, but with an entirely different meaning.

She squeezed my shoulder and started to head for the office door.

“No,” I held my hand out to her. “Please.”

She came back, without me having to admit that I didn’t want to do this alone. That I hadn’t been able to stand being truly alone since the days of rationing the dying battery of my e-diary on a bed pushed against a wall covered in a mural of the Periodic Table. She simply sat on the edge of the chair, steadying me. 

I hit play on the video. 

“My name is Yu Chen, and I was waiting tables at Gaston’s today when—I can’t say much, but everyone is afraid that… What happened at Comic Con, and over in Anaheim, I… I just… My name is Yu Chen, and what I can tell you is this: Rise up while you can."

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this. I offered to write Newsflesh because i’ve read it so many times, but it was still super-intimidating, and I only hope I did it some amount of justice!
> 
> The game Alisa mentions is based off the real Disneyland map created for Left 4 Dead 2. There are several Let’s Plays on Youtube. Further inspiration came from a deviant-art photo set called Life After Disney: https://www.deviantart.com/eledoremassis02/art/Life-After-Disney-Main-Street-176972844


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